Devin Nunes's much-touted California farm secretly moved to Iowa in 2006, in a district dependent on undocumented workers
California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes (previously) has been one of Trump's most ardent supporters, who has used his office as Head of the House Intelligence Committee to promote the evidence-free conspiracy theory that Obama's FBI spied on the Trump campaign.
Historically, Nunes has set himself apart from his fellow Republicans: willing to compromise on immigration reform, and hailing from the predominantly Democratic state of California.
Nunes's Californian roots have been key to his electoral success; his campaign literature, press interviews and public appearances make great hay out of his family's dairy farm in California.
What Nunes's materials don't mention is that his family secretly relocated the family farm to Iowa in 2006, to the town of Sibley (a town best known for having unsuccessfully sued a resident for putting up a website complaining about the "rotten blood and stale beer odors" produced by a dog-food factory).
Esquire's Ryan Lizza went to Sibley to investigate the Nunes family's move and its shroud of secrecy and found himself mired in an American gothic small-town mystery, shadowed everywhere he went by Nunes family members in SUVs (he put Gopros in his car and used them to record his watchers, who creepily circled every spot he parked; he was later able to identify them on Facebook).
Lizza spoke to multiple sources who described the town and its dairy industry's dependence on undocumented labor (including multiple sources who claimed direct knowledge of undocumented workers employed on the Nunes family farm), and the town's growing disenchantment with Donald Trump and their Congressman, Steve King (previously) a white supremacist xenophobe who is the Republican's strongest anti-immigration advocate (Sibley is in Osceola County, and was the county's strongest Trump-voting district, going 79% for Trump) (Nunes's father has only ever donated to two federal candidates: his son, and Steve King). Read the rest